How do we make decisions as consumers? What do we pay attention to, and how do our initial responses predict our final choices? To what extent are these processes unconscious and cannot be reflected in overt reports? This course will provide you with an introduction to some of the most basic methods in the emerging fields of consumer neuroscience and neuromarketing. You will learn about the methods employed and what they mean. You will learn about the basic brain mechanisms in consumer choice, and how to stay updated on these topics. The course will give an overview of the current and future uses of neuroscience in business.

JK

This course has really helped me gain thorough knowledge and research direction in this field. Thank you Prof. Ramsay for the wonderful course material and very good examples.

MP

Mar 02, 2018

Filled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled Star

Very well explained and very informative session on consumer neuroscience and neuro Marketing. The way of presentation kept me intrested and glued to the sessions. Thank you

From the lesson

Attention & Consciousness

In the second module of this course we are turning to the functions of the brain, and we will first focus on attention and consciousness. This module will focus on some key concepts in attention and consciousness.

Taught By

Thomas Zoëga Ramsøy

Transcript

Okay. So in this second week we will talk about two different studies related to attention and consciousness, and we will talk about one method that is rel, relevant for assessing parts of our visual attention. We will talk about the Christensen et al study on using fMRI in studying consciousness. And we will talk about the Milosavljevic et al study on bottom-up attention and consumer choice. And the method we will talk about is a computational neuroscience method called NeuroVision. In the study by Mark Christianson and colleagues, the aim of the study was to basically, study the effect of brief exposures of stimuli on brain activation. So when people are looking at a particular object, what happens to the brain when they see that object consciously, as opposed to when they don't see it consciously. What happens in the brain? By showing very brief stimuli for something like 16 milliseconds all the way up to a 100 milliseconds, the researchers were able to disentangle people's experience of seeing that object. Of course, the longer the stimulus was shown the more likely it was that they had a clear experience of it. But, they were also able to disentangle the the duration of the stimulus from the actual experience effect. So, by looking at that we were able to look at the part of the brain that were responsible for actually generating the feeling or being at least correlated with the feeling of seeing the stimulus. And this is as we can see in the middle here when comparing the direct feeling of when people saying I had a clear experience of what I saw here, as opposed to when people said I didn't have, have any experience of the stimulus at all. You can see the resulting contrast image here shows the regions of the brain that are more engaged when people are conscious of a stimulus. And as you can see there's a huge area of the brain that's distributed in what we call a global system of the brain that gets engaged when people are more experiencing a stimulus. Now we've put this into context. The brain has a size that is approximately 2% of the complete body mass. But at the same time, the brain's energy needs is something like 20% of the body. So this means that the brain consumes a lot of energy for relative to the rest of the body. This also means that the harder the brain has to work, the more energy it spends in solving a particular task, the more its actually using that energy from the body. And that's why you also tend to be exhausted when you're thinking very hard about a problem you're solving and concentrating very hard on a particular problem. It's almost like being physically active. So, what happens then is that this is a high energy expenditure for the brain. And what it makes sense for the brain to do is to develop shortcuts and heuristics and autopilot behavior. So when you're walking, for example, now you don't need to really think about why use, you know, every single step of, of the way, you don't need to focus on each and every step. Your brain is automatically doing that for you. When you were learning to ride a bike for example, or drive a car, you had to focus your mental energy during the learning phase, but now, it's more or less on autopilot. So this is why it makes sense is that because if you really need to focus your cons, conscious energy on one particular item, you basically have to spend a lot of energy on doing that. And it doesn't make sense for the brain to focus its energy in every single move, every single time you need to do it. And this is very relevant for consumer behavior as well. A lot of the choices we do as consumers are on autopilot, so selecting an item, walking down the aisle, knowing where to go for example. All of that, it doesn't really require energy from us. While some of other things such as deciding which card to, to buy, which insurance to make and so forth, it does typically spend, typically expend more energy on that. So the insight from the Chistensen-Van study, is that consciousness is expensive, in terms of energy, our energy budget, and that saving energy by making heuristics and shortcuts and autopilot behavior makes a lot of sense to the brain. In the study by Milosablijavic and colleagues it really contains a lot of different elements here. But the basic question is, when we are making choices about fast moving consumer goods such as chocolate, for example, to what extent are we relying our choices on the basic visual features of the options we have? By showing different options for varying du durations the researchers were able to auto-manipulate different packages and increase or decrease the relative saliency by changing the contrast, their brightness and so forth as you can see here in the image. And what they found was that people's preference or people's choices were a l, to a large extent driven by the relative salience of the options until about 200 milliseconds. So it means that if a product was shown for just a few 100 milliseconds, the relative saliency of a package had a large impact on what people actually chose. While if people had a bit longer time in actually deciding and looking at the product, then their intern preference, so to speak, for the product were more dominant. The researchers also did some studies with a induced cognitive load, so they have some work to do at the same time. They also induce stress and they found basically the same thing. When people are working hard, when they have a brief time to make up their minds, visual saliency has a lot to, to say about that. At the same time, what we can then say is then a visual saliency is something that goes on continuously. So, the things that people are automatically drawn to in an image, is playing a big role in what we're choosing as consumers but only in certain conditions. And finally, let's look at a tool. Neurovision is one of many tools that are available for looking at what we call the visual saliency of items, of images and videos, for example. Now things that we are looking at or driving our attention around automatically or by will. And Neurovision is one model that predicts where people are going to look automatically. So it doesn't predict where people are going to look at by sheer motivation if you're looking for something red or blue, but it does predict where people are automatically going to look things, things such as density, contrast color composition, movements, for example. We know those things are driving automatically people's attention. So it's a computational neuroscience model that is based on science, and is validated by our tracking. It's predicting something like 85% of eye-tracking results. Since it's computational model, it doesn't really require you to test any people. So it's predicting just based on the features in the image, what people are going to look at, and that's why it can be working as a cloud-based, automated system. It has an online dashboard you can, you can use, and it's a DIY tool. It's a Do-It-Yourself tool that researchers and practitioners alike can use to, to evaluate package design, in-store shelf design, for example. Ads and brand placement and product placement, for example. And as we'll see here, I'll log in to the system and we'll run a brief analysis just to show you. Here I'm just going to log in. So what we can do, for example, is can take a particular snapshot from, let's say a page, it could be today's page at CNN. So take a particular snapshot of that screen. There we go. And we can select that, go to deck job, Desktop. We find the image. Like this. And now it's there. And we upload the image. It's uploaded. We run the analysis. The analysis of the image just looking at particular items such as density, contrast and so forth. And by just analyzing those properties of the image it can predict where people are actually going to look. So here we go. So, and we just define this as a webpage, because that allows us to rank the, and, and kind of evaluate the page based on that. Now, let's see, so the things that tends to attract most attention in the image set tends to be these kind of dark areas down here. You'll also see that text such as down here and the items up here don't really attract much attention. That's a different way of looking at that while looking at what we call the fog map. So the likelihood that people are going to look at the text and read and remember the text is really high. The chance that they are looking at this isle in particular or some items up here is much lower. And going back to this here. Which you also can see here is the visual complexity score which is indication of the relative information load. So, how much information is there in the image? It's about 30% which is kind of moderate. That means that there's a lot of things going on in the image and the likelihood of people [INAUDIBLE] at one particular item is pretty low. And it seems to indicate then that. Basically the, the the complexity image, it might be a bit high but on the other side if you're interested in showing that there, the page contains a lot of information then you, you're doing a good job. So, again, if you really want to have people looking at a particular item on the screen such as this Kurdish for example, or Editors choice or see the brand information on CNN. Then as you can see, the likelihood that people are going to look at that automatically, is not very high, and it shows you that, in order for people to look at that, they need to orient themselves, they need to actively and, you know, employ top-down attention in order to look for those regions. So there you go, this is the NeuroVision tool, which is a automated image analysis tool that allows you to automatically evaluate images and videos for the visual saliency, but also some other properties such as image complexity.

Explore our Catalog

Join for free and get personalized recommendations, updates and offers.

Coursera provides universal access to the world’s best education, partnering with top universities and organizations to offer courses online.